Intel 845 DDR Motherboard Roundup - December 2001

FIC VC15

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FIC is the second manufacturer in this roundup to offer 3 DIMM slots on their 845 DDR board and they go beyond the call of duty to provide much more than that in their VC15. The board features 6 PCI slots, the ALC201 AC'97 codec from Avance Logic (Realtek) as well as the RTL8100L 10/100 PCI Ethernet controller also from Realtek.

The onboard audio and LAN make the VC15 a very complete solution and the addition of the third DIMM slot make it even more attractive. FIC should have gone with the 0.25-micron RTL8100B in order to save a small amount of PCB space instead of the larger 0.35-micron controller they're currently using for their LAN but the difference isn't large enough to penalize the VC15 on.

Both the audio and Ethernet options worked just fine and are arguably more useful to some users than the IDE RAID that most other motherboard manufacturers outfit their boards with. We would have liked to have seen an Intel PHY used instead of the Realtek offering for the more server/workstation oriented users but the Realtek controller is just fine for any desktop use.

Like the ECS P4IBAD, FIC chose to offer a list of 11 FSB settings instead of letting the user pick their FSB frequency using 1MHz increments over 100MHz. FIC does offer some higher FSB options but again, there is no reason they couldn't have implemented the same option for 1MHz FSB increments that most of the other manufacturers have done.

Unfortunately the VC15 does not offer voltage adjustments of any kind which make it less of an enthusiast caliber board, but still just fine for the user that's not keen on overclocking.

The solution is very well rounded and we didn't encounter any issues during our testing.